Kondom des Grauens

Killer Condom is a likable camp project, not only in terms of viewer optics, but also in its creative roots. The film was created based on motifs from the comic book of the same name by leading German queer author Ralf König, who over the course of years rose from the underground to a place in the sun thanks, among other things, to the strong popularity of the film adaptation of another one of his works, The Most Desired Man (1994). Whereas in that case the adaptation smoothed out the edges of König’s source material, Killer Condom adds even more queer and camp levels to those found in the original short comic book. The result comes across a bit as if John Waters had decided to make a mix of hardboiled noir and a 1950s B-movie with monsters and mad scientists. Faithfulness to the source material (after all, Killer Condom begins with the credit “A Ralf König Film”) is also evident in the New York setting, as the filmmakers have an absolute field day with depicting the decadent and debauched world, which they do not demonise, but openly adore while revelling in caricaturing its iconic attributes and images from mainstream films. The film adaptation of Killer Condom is thus even more of a queer camp paraphrase of the trash genre than the original comic book and is similarly impressive with its proudly queer characters and paraphrases of genre formulas. ___ PS: Troma said it would only buy a weird German film for American distribution. Kaufman and co. had nothing at all to do with the making of Killer Condom. (19.06.2022)